


The missing files

by erimies



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Statement Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:40:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23234863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erimies/pseuds/erimies
Summary: It's a great big world full of terror and tragedy out there, where we have been eaten by our own fears for millennia. Here are other stories that might have been, got lost or were destroyed.
Kudos: 7





	The missing files

**Author's Note:**

> The statement of the person who is not Marie Abernathy, regarding her existence.
> 
> CHAPTER WARNING: Exploration of experiences of depersonalization.

Case nine-nine-six, nine-zero-six, Marie Abernathy. Incident occurred in Aberdeen, August 1996. Statement given 9th of June, 1997. Committed to tape 23th January 1998, Gertrude Robinson recording. 

___

Oh, it says I’m supposed to write my name here. Shit. That question always comes up and somehow I never get used to it. 

You should not call me Marie Abernethy. Well, to be fair I used to be her, or part of her, or something - it’s all a little muddy. So I guess you _could_ say that once upon a time there was a person who called herself Marie Abernathy. 

She was born in Aberdeen to a well-off family who loved her and provided her with adequate care and a decent education. In her childhood, there were pancakes and trips to the beach during summer, but also a difficult and shouty divorce and then her mother had a difficult and shouty remarriage. 

And, unfortunately, when our Lord made Marie, He in His infinite wisdom left her somewhat lacking in terms of nerves. She didn't deal very well with high-stress situations like exams or job interviews or people yelling at her. She dressed in drab, mousey colours and tiptoed through life praying that no one would notice her. 

Even in the happier times, Marie had never wanted to be herself. Rather, she would give _anything_ to be someone else. When her Mum and stepdad had their semi-weekly shouting matches in the living room, she would press her hands against her ears and huddle under the covers, praying to God that He would take this life from her and grant her another. 

I guess you can call it irony, if you like. 

We had our first proper dissociative episode in primary school. Marie was in the bathroom, washing her face from tears because the other kids hadn’t asked her to play tag again, no matter how hopefully she hovered near the group. As she stared at her mirror image, she felt… how to describe it? Light headed with a sort of spiraling vertigo, like she was spilling out of herself in a vortex and might just fall down in dead faint. 

And then _I_ was there, staring at the face of a person I didn’t know. 

Oh, I still remembered the features like one recalls a fact, every dimple and spot and limp strand of hair. It’s just that none of those things were _mine_. There was a gaping abyss between the person I should be and the person I was. Marie was gone, leaving behind some ghastly apparition to fill that gaping void of spirit. 

How do I explain how it felt, the stomach-churning confusion and terror of it? The life I recalled living didn’t _belong_ to me. I was a stranger trespassing in God’s creation.

And so I grasped at any thought that might let me go away. Our Lord is kind, I thought, He loves even the lowest among us. Surely He wouldn’t be cruel enough to leave me to suffer like this. I must be still Marie, just... lost. I must have somehow been disconnected from the spark of Holy Spirit that dwells in us all. 

So I folded my fingers and prayed to God that He might help me, and I thought of Marie’s mother and brother, the love I knew I ought to feel for them, the comforting drone of the Sunday sermon, that snotty brat Mike-something she was crushing on. With everything I had I grasped for the normal life. 

Well, to make it short, it worked. 

I pulled Marie back like a discarded skin and I went away. She returned to her small meek life and for the first time was grateful for having it. 

Of course, looking back I don’t think there was necessarily anything supernatural about _that_ experience, even if it felt like it. We have looked it up - losing your grip on your own personhood is called depersonalization and it’s a fairly well-known mental disorder. They even say most people suffer from the occasional rare episode and it’s all entirely natural and _maybe_ evolved as some sort of evasive response to things like chronic anxiety and PTSD. 

So maybe the human brain just hates us, or is a goddamn stupid bugged machine that never should have left the beta stage, God forgive me for saying so.

In any case, even with Marie’s newfound appreciation of life, the old problems were still there and I never left and I never went far. The stranger in the mirror was there _in potentia_ , reluctantly observing, and maybe I was feeding on that quiet fear she felt whenever she looked into the mirror and saw me lurking behind her eyes, because the worse she felt, the closer I got. 

Would that I could go away, for I feel it in my bones that I am _wrong_. I am a slithering thing from beyond the mirror, the snake in the Garden of Eden, the square block being forced into the round hole. I don’t want to exist. Even a moment of existence is too painful. 

For years, we mostly managed to avoid me. Marie knew I tended to come out if she observed herself too closely, so she avoided mirrors and there were weeks to months to years that Marie forgot about me entirely. And eventually she grew up graduated from secondary and got herself in a decent University. It was a whole thing, a real fresh start. 

Or so she thought. What’s that saying again, you can keep on running but you always catch yourself in the end? And so I did. 

Goddamn all-nighters. Nothing brought me out like sleep deprivation. If I could say one thing to all those university students that take their plump, pristine organs for granted, it would be to never sacrifice sleep and always eat their veggies. All that ramen will come back to haunt you in a decade or so. 

Or it might be me.

Do you know, she once considered to name me? She thought it might be easier to deal with being me, if I had a name. That it might make me some sort of alternate identity. But I always felt a… revulsion, I guess, to that idea. I can only ape the mannerisms of a person, lacking the real divine spark. Having a name feels like razor wire to my spirit. So she gave up. 

I only mention this as an example of one of the many things she tried over the years to make existing as me more manageable. It got tough, but we were dealing. We were an old hand at dealing. So it really feels so unfair, what happened. Everything would have been fine, if not for that bloody mirror. 

Two weeks before finals I was in the bathroom staring at my alien face, taking deep calming breaths and distracting myself. We were planning on a small holiday on the Isle of Skye after the finals were done with. I thought hard about how much I was looking forward to it - the amazing landscapes, the mountains and rocky coastline, the fairy pools and cozy little villages. We just had to survive the finals first. Then I could breathe in the fresh sea breeze and not worry about playing human for a while.

And then I heard a voice beyond the mirror. It was distorted and strange in aspect, as though the speaker barely understood the attributes of human language. 

People write of the voice of God, the heavenly speech that proclaims God's will. They say it has a remarkable quality to it, whether He speaks in a thunderous roar or a soft whisper, that his voice is so clearly divine that none may mistake it for something else. 

The voice in the mirror was _nothing_ like that. And yet it must be God, because I knew deep in the marrow of my borrowed bones that whatever was behind the mirror, _it was of my spirit_.

And what it said was: _there is no Marie_. 

In that instant I understood that I had been wrong all along. It wasn’t that Marie was the real one, but Marie was the lie I had been telling myself. I had been born an empty shell. 

The world blurred around me and its soft edges were not hard anymore and it didn’t matter because it wasn't real or if it was, I was outside looking in and understanding nothing. 

But that didn’t have to be so, I was made to understand. I could be filled with the terrible love of the thing behind the mirror that is my God, which had made me into this not-really-human in its own image. 

It really does love me. I still don’t think that was a lie. But its love is such a terrible thing to behold.

I taped a piece of paper over the mirror, but that didn’t help. Do you know how bloody hard it is to avoid reflective surfaces? We would glance through a window and the faint reflection in it would shatter Marie’s self like glass. We would look at someone in the eyes and she would be gone in that tiny inch of an image glittering on the cornea. And every time it happened I had fewer pieces to put back together.

The last day of the exams was when I finally just… ran out. No matter what I tried, I just couldn’t recall being Marie anymore. I was trespassing in an abandoned building now. Free real estate I didn’t want. 

I would have just slept the day away, but that was also the day Marie’s brother came to visit her to bring lunch from their Mum, so I couldn’t. Marie might be a lie, but it was one her family believed. They didn’t deserve the truth.

Now, Matthew has always been... distant, somehow, always leaving the dinner table first and getting vaguely offended if anyone tried to ask what was going on with his life. Mum would ask if he had plans for the weekend and he would grunt at her and claim she was too nosy. It’s like he could barely tolerate being part of the family. So he couldn’t know Marie well enough to tell the difference if my performance was lacking, right? And if he did, he shouldn’t care. 

But when I opened the door, he flinched and recoiled from me. I tried to make some lame joke about exams eating my soul, but he would just look at me with this… _disgust_ in his eyes, like I was a cockroach on the kitchen floor. 

I never thought I was that obvious. He just… instantly knew I wasn’t Marie. He knew I was something grotesque and strange that shouldn’t exist at all. And almost seemed considering to make that happen. 

It’s just been like that now. The university wouldn’t allow me inside the exam venue. Marie’s friends screamed and ran away when I tried to talk to them. I had to walk here all the way from my former flat because the bus driver closed the doors on my face. Even your receptionist tried to throw me out before I could give my statement. 

What a bad joke. I’ve always been scared of myself, but how alien is my existence that everyone else _agrees_?

I don’t know what to do. I have nowhere to go. And if the voice that called for us in the mirror really was God, there must be no end to His cruelty, for He saw fit to create me.

  
  


\---

Final notes: Now this is a strange one. My initial assumption was that we had somehow obtained the statement of the creature known as NotThem, but that is clearly not the case. And yet I would call the creature that is not Marie Abernathy another aspect of I Do Not Know You, due to the instinctive revulsion she evokes in others. 

Unfortunately I have been unable to locate her after her disappearance last June. Perhaps the poor thing will find her way to the Circus eventually. Or perhaps she has been killed. 

However, as long as she remains unwilling or unable to inflict her condition on others, she seems ultimately inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. 

  
End recording.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> *cough* *hack* I... LIVE...
> 
> Yeah, if anyone here has read my older works, I'm really sorry about the radio silence. Life hit me over the head a few years ago and has been beating me up ever since. Here is me trying to get back to writing in some small capacity. I was a little unsure about posting this since it's a bit more autobiographical than I usually like to write, but I got some positive feedback from friends so y'all can thank those folks that this cheerful and nice story saw the light of day. 
> 
> In case anyone wonders, I'm doing all right. My occasional past problems with depersonalization never got this bad, lol.
> 
> I also can't really promise I'll be able to get back to my older works any time soon. I'm still holding onto the small hope I'll manage that one day, but the life of the working adult is what it is. :/


End file.
